Last night I finished Julia Alvarez’s De cómo las muchachas García perdieron el acento. 300 pages en español. Today I celebrate this accomplishment by posting the news on Facebook. Jaja. Spoiler Alert: on the last page Yoyo, the García sister who would become a famous writer, is haunted by dreams of a black cat. As a young mischievous girl, Yoyo smuggled a new-born kitten away from its mother. Would her dreams represent a guilty conscience? A rotten soul? Julia Alvarez is no Edgar Allan Poe, but I studied this book as a future class novel selection. I liked it! I think my students will, too. Julia identifies intimate, heart-crushing elements of the U.S. immigrant experience we can all identify with. I mean, we are all immigrants.
I may be wrong, but I think the Black Cat in Yoyo’s dreams represents the Dominican Republic her family left behind. Below, I take the opportunity to create a graphic organizer for How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents that will serve as a model for my students in a future assignment. I hope they have as much fun with it as I did.
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